BATTLEFIELD OF ETERNITY IS AWESOME

by   •   Heroes of the Storm
 

This post is over 10 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

The Battlefield of Eternity was released today as part of the Heroes of the Storm Eternal Conflict patch, and it’s amazing.

Back in June, the official Blizzard Heroes of the Storm account tweeted concept art for the Battlefield of Eternity, which I promptly favorited.

Source: https://twitter.com/BlizzHeroes/status/607286408617664512

After the patch got released today, I quickly queued up for a game and was lucky enough to get Battlefield of Eternity as my first map in my first game.

As it was loading up, I took a screenshot of the loading screen:

Heroes of the Storm Battlefield of Eternity Loading Screen

I also took a screenshot of the Immortal fight in the center of the map, when they clashed with each other during relocation.

Heroes of the Storm Battlefield of Eternity Immortals

I play on minimum graphics settings because I have a laptop with a mobility graphics processor, overall not designed for high-intensity gaming. I also prefer to keep my FPS as high as possible, particularly when I’m streaming and a lot of my processing power is being put towards that.

Even then, the map still looked nice, and met my expectation of satisfaction. I can’t wait to see it being played at maximum quality on professional/full-time streamers’ broadcasts who have high-end computers.

 

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My third game back to League of Legends ranked solo queue

by   •   League of Legends
 

This post is over 11 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

In order to stay relevant as an entertainer in League of Legends, I decided to play a few ranked games to keep up with the game and see how it’s evolved in the months during which I haven’t really played the game seriously.

It would be fantastic if I could continue being a caster without ever playing the game, but unfortunately, doing so leaves me in the dark in a lot of areas, so it’s critical that I continue to play the game first-hand to collect personal experience.

I am proud to announce that the game is just the same as it used to be before I quit to move on to Heroes of the Storm.

(Click to enlarge)

Compared to this, playing Heroes of the Storm is like gliding through the heavens while cuddling a cloud.

Edit: As a disclaimer, I’m all for a triple marksman team composition (even though it would probably not do too well against a dive composition like the one the enemy team had).

I love innovation, and would like to see Urgot in a solo lane and Ashe as support being thrown in by Kalista’s Fate’s Call, only to crowd control them even further with a point-blank guaranteed Enchanted Crystal Arrow.

What I’m pointing out in this post is the attitude that our Ashe brought into the game, as you can see by her chat messages and summoner spells.

 

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HotS feature suggestion: add skins to “Hero Collection” screen

by   •   Heroes of the Storm
 

This post is over 11 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

There are two primary incentives for purchasing skins. One of them is to satisfy yourself – if you like a skin, you will most likely buy it because you’ll enjoy looking at your character while you’re playing.

The second incentive is that it’s a way of showing off to others; you want to show off your…

  • Style. You want other people to see what you like.
  • Financial status. Having a skin shows that you are financially comfortable to be spending money on cosmetic content in a game.
  • Generosity. You want other people to enjoy looking at the skin as well. (Or, from a different per­spec­tive, you’re generously giving back to Blizzard for making a free game that you like.)

Heroes of the Storm does a great job satisfying people’s desire to show off by including skins in player pro­files. Using mine as an example, you can see that I own Ranger-General Sylvanas, Angelic Valla, and Mas­ter Zagara.

Parkzer - Heroes of the Storm - Profile

This is a very nice touch to the game, and I appreciate the fact that the HotS development team is atten­tive enough to details that they would include this feature.

However, in my opinion, they didn’t take it all the way.

If you click on the Hero Collection tab, you’ll come across this screen:

Parkzer - Heroes of the Storm - Hero Collection

From here, you can click on each hero to zoom in to progression details.

Unfortunately, even though each individual hero’s skins appears on the Profile Summary tab, it does not appear in the Hero Collection tab. As you can see from the screenshots, the three skins featured in my sum­ma­ry are not featured in my collection.

Parkzer - Heroes of the Storm - Sylvanas

Parkzer - Heroes of the Storm - Valla

Parkzer - Heroes of the Storm - Zagara

My feature suggestion is to add skins to the Hero Collection screens as well.

Not only will this allow players to feature their favorite skins, but it also lets them do it for all heroes they own, and not just the three most played that show up in the Profile Summary.

Seeing as skin featuring is already in the Profile Summary, it’s obvious that the technology is already there. I think it would be a nice touch if its implementation was extended to the Hero Collection tab.

This will also allow Blizzard to increase skin sales, as they’re giving another outlet for players to show off what they own.

 

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The climb is complete – Heroes of the Storm Hero League Rank 1

by   •   Heroes of the Storm
 

This post is over 11 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

I’m proud to announce that, through my commitment to climbing the Hero League ranked ladder on Heroes of the Storm in the past two weeks, I have reached my goal and hit Rank 1 today.

It seems like once you reach Rank 1, you go off a different point system, where you can collect up to 1,000 points. The point progress bar also disappears, so you’ll have to hover over your rank in order to see how many points you have left until you max out.

I’m eager to set my new goal at 1,000 points into Rank 1, but I’m also a little hesitant, as I don’t want to overwork myself.

As you might have suspected, I tend to get burnt out pretty easily, especially if I’m doing something by myself, and I don’t want this same thing to happen to Heroes of the Storm. Because of all the dedication and focus I’ve been putting into this, as well as the fact that I am solo queueing all my games, I feel as if it’s even more susceptible to burning me out.

So, for now, I’m going to mix in some different games into my schedule for a little while as I cool down from Heroes of the Storm, and only play it casually for a bit. From there, I’ll decide if I’ll go for the ultimate goal of 1,000 points before the Grandmaster system gets introduced (the gold border that was asset-farmed from a recent patch).

 

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My HotS NA-to-EU ping is lower than my LoL NA-to-NA ping

by   •   Heroes of the Storm, League of Legends
 

This post is over 11 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Earlier today, Blizzard announced that globalization was enabled for Heroes of the Storm.

Until now, Heroes of the Storm was region-specific. If you got a key, you had to make sure you got a prop­er NA or EU key for your account.

Now, with globalization, every account can play on any server, and multiple regional accounts can be bound to a single Battle.net log-in.

I decided to test out this change by logging in to the European Heroes of the Storm server. I finished some of the starting tutorials, then hopped in a Cooperative game.

My ping was actually impressively low, compared to my expectations, and I tweeted about it:

I hovered around 132 ms when I played on the EU server. When I play League of Legends on the NA ser­ver, my ping often sits around the 140s.

Everyone says that their connection to the League of Legends servers are fine, and they blame it on my Internet, but it’s sort of hard to believe when stuff like this happens … lol

 

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I’ve been playing a lot of Sylvanas lately

by   •   Heroes of the Storm, Notes
 

This post is over 11 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

I’ve started playing a lot more Heroes of the Storm recently, and I’ve formed a particular liking for Sylvanas. She seems to be a hero that, if left unattended, can cause massive destruction to the enemy team. Due to her great pushing power, as well as decent mobility, I’ve been playing her a lot and trying to figure out the best way to abuse her skill set.

Similar to how I’ve done in the past with Diablo, I decided to use my blog as dumping ground for my thoughts and notes. I decided to go through Sylvanas’ talents and pick out the ones I feel would be viable to use.

This isn’t necessarily designed for public use, and more of a place for me to organize my thoughts; it’s also def­i­nite­ly not guaranteed to be “correct,” and shouldn’t be used as a guide. Still, I decided to post it publicly in case there are people who are completely lost, and would like a starting point for theorizing about Sylvanas’ talents.

Like always, I recommend using guides as a way to help you direct your thinking, rather than something that you should mindlessly follow.

Tier 1

  • Lost Soul: Reduces the cooldown of Shadow Dagger by 2 seconds. I think this two seconds is a huge deal, because often times, when I need to use this ability, there’s a few seconds left on the cooldown and I don’t get maximum value from it. It’ll also be helpful in team fights, as being able to use this ability more often means I get to heal more off my Tier 7 talent.
  • With the Wind: Increases Withering Fire’s range by 25%. I used to use this talent, but decided that lower Shadow Dagger cooldown is a bit better. This helps with long-range poke, but if I’m basic attacking my opponent at the same time, I don’t feel like this 25% is worth that much anymore.

Tier 4

  • Paralysis: Increases duration of Black Arrows by 100%. This talent synergizes well with the Tier 13 talent Overwhelming Affliction, as well as helps Sylvanas out when clearing mercenary camps. This talent allows Sylvanas to solo a siege camp while taking no damage by constantly basic attacking one monster and using Withering Fire on the other. It refills just in time for Black Arrows to reapply before running out.
  • Ranger’s Ambush: Using Haunting Wave to teleport refills all charges of Withering Fire. This ability is good for bursting people down, but I feel as if it’s outclassed by the synergy between Paralysis and Overwhelming Affliction.

Tier 7

  • Life Drain: Shadow Dagger heals you for 10 each time it spreads to a new enemy. I think having sustain on Heroes of the Storm is extremely important, and this allows Sylvanas to stay healthy and lets your healer save their cooldowns for someone else. During fights, this can be used as a baiting mechanic when people are focusing you down, because you can throw out your Shadow Dagger and keep healing. If you’re forced out of a fight, you can go over to a nearby minion wave, heal back up, and rejoin the fight.
  • Unstable Poison: Minions and Mercenaries that die under the effects of Black Arrows explode, dealing 75 damage to nearby enemies. I guess this talent is fine for a double-support composition where you need more damage and you have plenty of healing from your allies. This feels like more of a surprise talent where people run away into a minion wave, then die for it because they don’t expect their own minions to blow up and hurt them.

Tier 10

  • Wailing Arrow: Shoot an arrow that can be reactivated to deal 200 damage and silencing ene­mies in an area for 2.5 seconds. The arrow detonates automatically when it reaches maxi­mum range. This heroic ability deals a good amount of damage and disables the enemies from using abilities. This seems way too good to ever be a second choice behind the other heroic, Possession. All Possession seems to do is give you more pushing power, which I believe Sylvanas has plenty of. Possession also encourages constant laning and split pushing, which is counter­productive in Heroes of the Storm.

Tier 13

  • Overwhelming Affliction: Black Arrows now also applies to Heroes, slowing their Movement Speed by 5% for the duration. Stacks up to 5 times. This synergizes well with Paralysis, and can cripple the enemy team over the span of a long team fight. This stacks up to 5 times, which means that you have a 25% slow – yes, this means you slow people as much as Jaina does, and she is a frost mage. This movement will massively turn fights into your favor because low-mobility heroes now have even lower mobility, and anyone with a gap closer can easily catch up and lock them down.
  • Spell Shield: Upon taking Ability Damage, reduce that damage and further Ability Damage by 50% for 2 seconds. Can only trigger once every 30 seconds. This seems like an okay talent if you’re getting focused down a lot and the enemy team has a lot of burst damage. However, this seems like a talent better fit for someone with no mobility abilities who ends up getting forced to tank through spells. Sylvanas should be able to get away, so Overwhelming Affliction generally seems like a better idea in most situations.

Tier 16

  • Cold Embrace: Shadow Dagger makes enemies Vulnerable, taking 25% more damage, but the range of Shadow Dagger is reduced by 25%. By this point in the game, you should be constantly moving around with your team, and making enemies vulnerable will help out a lot during team fights. Remember that Shadow Dagger spreads a lot, and already has its cooldown reduced from the tier 1 talent, so this will be a massive damage boost during team fights. Shadow Dagger already has a pretty long range, and this range reduction shouldn’t cause much of a problem – I barely even notice it.

Tier 20

  • Deafening Blast: Enemies at the center of Wailing Arrow’s explosion take 50% more damage and are silenced for twice as long. If you’re able to initiate with this spell and catch a large number of people, you basically have five seconds to kill the enemy team, which has effectively been reduced in usefulness to a bunch of minions (because they can’t use their abilities anymore). The damage increase and silence duration increase seems too good, as it brings way too much powerful utility to your team. Mix this in with the vulnerability from Shadow Dagger and a good Sylvanas initiation could mean an instant team fight win.
  • Fury of the Storm: Every 5 seconds, your next basic attack will deal an additional 20 damage to the target, and 20 damage to all nearby Minions and Mercenaries. I’ve taken this talent once to save my Core and won the game off of it. This is obviously a very situational talent that should only be taken if you are about to lose the game to minions, and the only way you can clear all of them quickly enough is to use Fury of the Storm.

 

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